3-D Kinetic cellular Automaton -- Copyright 1995 Stewart Dickson

1) Art Historical Precedent

Interactive computer art is an amalgamation of time-based media and an active viewer. Humanity's ability to reason in terms of space-time events is thought to be a basic evolutionary advantage which separates our species from our more primitive ancestors. Therefore, our interest in dynamic abstractions has existed since prehistory and evidence of this interest is present in artworks such as the cave paintings of France and Spain. [1] Until the advent of post-mechanical (photographic) reproduction and motion pictures at the turn of the Twentieth Century, our technical ability to treat time-varying imagery in art was primarily concentrated in performed ritual (refer to Harry Partch's "corporeal music" [2]) and the theatre.

In the 1920's, the Italian Futurists expressed the excitement of the times in visual celebrations of speed and dynamism. [3] Their influences were drawn from the later industrial revolutionary icons of the factory, the steam locomotive, the automobile and the cinema. Simultaneously, Dada declared that there is no art. There is only the artist and the viewer and art exists as a statement from artist to viewer.

Alexander Calder created what was perhaps among the first kinetic sculpture, the Mobile, named by Marcel Duchamp. (He also created some early "performed" sculpture in the form of articulated circus tableaux.) [4] The mobile was still not intended to be modified by the viewer beyond the point of setting it in motion. It was not until the neo-Dada Fluxus movement in the 1960's when the viewer became an active participant in the creation of the artwork ("happening") that truly interactive artwork came into being.

Today's digital computer is now thought to be the ultimate medium for interactive art. In all spatial respects, however, the computer art medium is subsumed by the video monitor, the standard computer output medium. We are again left with a time-varying work in two dimensions, regardless of the way in which the imagery is specified in the computing environment. Stereoscopic viewing and holography produce three-dimensional virtual images which do not have the same material presence as sculpture.

The work presented in this proposal seeks to free computer art from the virtual, video medium.

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